


The Bounty

by Piandaoist (piandaoist)



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Animal Death, Brutality, Burning, Decapitation, Gen, Murder
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-28
Updated: 2021-02-28
Packaged: 2021-03-12 12:22:12
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,911
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29759577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piandaoist/pseuds/Piandaoist
Summary: Colonel Piandao and General Guiying team up to hunt down a traitor.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Piandaoist's Short Stories Collection, The Piandao Library





	The Bounty

The prospect of getting lost puts a pinch on her gut when General Guiying realizes she can no longer hear Piandao’s gentle footfalls. There’s a nearly full moon tonight, but it’s completely obscured by dozens of tree species whose enmeshed branches form a towering ecosystem, blanketing the belly of the jungle in inkwell-like darkness.

It’s her ability to see the body heat of the living that tells her there are animals all around her, weaving in and out of the lush flora, creeping, stalking, waiting… She doesn’t see a Piandao-shaped beast among them.

Before she sees it, she hears the horrifying growl of a viper mere feet from her position. It permeates the darkness, bathed in the light of her heat vision, a long glowing coil of armored muscle slithering toward her.

Its mouth opens wide with a hair-raising shriek, revealing its fangs, both containing enough poison to kill a dozen people. It glides toward her over the damp soil and stone at a snail’s pace as if it's taunting her, daring her to make a run for it.

She remembers what Piandao told her: “Don’t firebend after dark. You’ll give away your position.” But her bending instincts are strong, triggered by her panic.

She watches in a dissociative daze as the snake smolders, bubbling white-hot from the inside as she boils its blood. It lets out a final blood-curdling scream before it lunges for her, falling mid-lunge to the ground just inches from the tip of her boot.

Despite Piandao telling her to “stay put” right before he headed out to scout the path ahead, she thinks maybe she should leave before some of its friends show up.

“Colonel Piandao! Where the flame are you? Piandao!” she says in a frenzied whisper, her throat dry with terror. “Answer me! That’s an order!”

She hears footfalls--too heavy to be Piandao’s--pounding their way through the brush as someone races toward her position. The shape of someone--too short and too thin to be Piandao--bursts through the treeline.

The **_WHOOSH_ ** of fire sets the jungle aglow, bathing it in soft yellows. A surge of adrenaline courses through her as she reaches into her quiver, loading three arrows onto her bow. Guiying pulls back on the bow, engaging her fire shield while she waits to get a closer look at her flaming target as they barrel toward her.

“Wait!” he cries out in a freakish high-pitched squeal that echoes across the jungle. “General Guiying, don't shoot! I surrender! Please…” he begs, collapsing to his knees in front of her. “Protect me!”

Kumaru is an old fool with a head full of snow-white hair and hands worn to the bone and curled up into hard balls with arthritis. He’s far too old to be playing survival games in some forsaken jungle.

An unexpected tide of emotion rises in her, taking her by surprise as Kumaru’s ultimate fate weighs heavily on her mind. It’s hard for her to put a name to the combination of pity, disgust, sorrow, and rage with a little revulsion thrown in for good measure.

What could he have done that was so bad that he felt he needed to desert? Why didn’t Kumaru reach out to her six months ago? They were supposed to be _friends_. He’d been her rock after the deaths of her son and husband, acting as her confidant, providing council and company. Why didn’t he let her return the favor?

“Protect you?” she scoffs, pulling him to his feet by his shoulder. “Kumaru, I’m here to arrest you for desertion!”

Kumaru led armies. He was proud, stubborn, fierce. He was voted General Most Likely to Burn Your House Down three years in a row. He **_was_ ** Fire Nation! But now, surrounded by the cacophony of predatorial sounds, under the thick canopy of the jungle, he’s a sweaty tangled mess of emotion.

A moment passes as she absorbs the situation.

Anxiety rests on the back of her neck like a cold finger. She’d relied on Piandao to track Kumaru down. But Piandao seems to have ghosted her, leaving her alone in the jungle to fend for herself and her prisoner. The silence starts working on their nerves.

The north wind whistles through the trees, tossing her short black and graying hair. There’s a flicker of lightning in the distances that catches the corner of her eye. As if this jungle wasn’t dismal enough, they’re going to have to slog back to their hounds through mud and muck.

“General Guiying...” Kumaru is crying, taking quick shallow breaths. “He’s here,” he manages in a feeble whisper.

Guiying scans the jungle for movement. With so many large animals at large, it’s difficult to tell if one of them is Piandao.

“I don’t see him,” she says.

Kumaru is looking down, his shoulders trembling slightly as he wipes pearls of sweat from his face.

“I saw him… He could have killed me, but he wanted me to see him. You can’t see him, but he’s there, in the trees, hiding among the animals.”

“Colonel Piandao is with me.”

His lips tremble with every word. “Piandao is with no one.” His voice is barely audible over the sounds of the jungle.

His eyes the color of chocolate flecked with gold roll upward toward the stately seventy-foot tall elm tree behind her in response to a **_CRACK_ ** that could be anything. Its heavy branches spread out forty feet in every direction, interconnecting with the elms and walnut trees around it.

He stands there, frozen, quaking with his hands held up in surrender. Lightning flashes as the tree’s branches bend in the wind setting the jungle in a contrast of black shadows against purple.

“I don’t understand--”

The wind whistles a deadly warning. She shudders at the intermittent **_THWACK-THUMP_ ** as Kumaru’s body falls to the ground.

She sees the shape of Piandao glowing in soft reds and yellows as he sheathes his sword. The head is stuffed into a burlap sack. She’s grateful that she can only see its heat signature. The body, covered by Piandao’s cloak, lies at her feet, still radiating heat through the cloth. All this goes down in less than five seconds.

Her arrows are drawn tight against her bow, straining to be free, to fly toward the heart of the Piandao-shaped killer in front of her.

“You didn’t have to do that.” The sudden surge of rage makes her head throb with the force of a splitting migraine. “He had already surrendered. He was wanted Dead or Alive. I wanted to take him alive.”

“He’s worth more to the Firelord dead.” Piandao’s voice is ice cold, carrying an indifference that seems like numb apathy. “So he’s worth more to me dead.”

“Liar!” Her fury stirs her fire, igniting her arrows’ tips, illuminating the sullen businesslike expression on Piandao’s face.

Piandao reaches into his tunic when she raises her arrows level with his eyes. She barely notices the droplets of cool rain that ping against her face.

Piandao lets out a tense sign, the buzz of adrenaline still coursing through him. “You can stand down, General. I’m just getting my orders.”

She snatches the Black Ribbon scroll from him before he can fully remove it from his tunic, snapping its seal and unrolling it. She ignites her flame so she can actually read the thing.

“Son of a bitch!” she hisses, still seething with anger.

“Which son of a bitch? Me? Or Azulon?”

“Both! Why the flame didn’t either one of you tell me you were sent to kill him? Kumaru, traitor or not, saved my husband’s life. We had a friendship that went back more than thirty years. It was my understanding that I’d be allowed to bring him back alive. I should have at least been given a heads-up.”

“I thought you and I had the same orders, General Guiying. I didn’t realize you were left out of the loop.”

Of course she was left out of the loop. If Azulon had told her he was sending someone with orders to kill Kumaru, she would have refused to track him down. She can be stubborn when she wants to, to the point of risking everything to defy unreasonable orders.

She raises her arrows again. “You should have told me you were going to use me as bait,” she says.

She hesitates, drawing the bow back, but her hand is steady and sure of its intent. Guiying is a domestic general--a police officer, not a war-hardened soldier. But she will kill Piandao if she needs to. She’s killed before.

“You didn’t have to terrorize him. You could have killed him back there and brought just the head back.”

“Kumaru wouldn’t have led me here if he didn’t have friends waiting for me,” Piandao says. “I cut him off before he could alert them. He had no other choice but to backtrack. He probably thought he could outrun me, double back around to take my supplies and my hound once he got away from me, and leave me here to fight off his friends. I have a huge bounty on me in the Earth Kingdom. I’m sure they’d love to collect it.”

He waits a silent minute, no doubt studying her reaction. Neither one of them are convinced that she believes him.

“He didn’t know you were with me,” Piandao continues. “I didn’t use you as bait. You were my backup. I knew you could handle whatever came your way.”

She’s not sure how, but she thinks Piandoa can see her rage. Her eyes are wide with it. Sometimes, you can see the flickers of light that flash in a firebender’s eyes as the burning fury moves through them like waves in a vast ocean.

“We’re two klicks from our entry point, and we crossed over into Earth Kingdom territory roughly fifteen minutes ago, General Guiying. You could try to make it back to your hound on your own. Maybe you won’t get caught in one of Kumaru’s booby-traps.”

He seems unphased by the arrows pointing at his head.

“By the way, General Guiying… Did you notice all those glowing eyes blinking back at us from every direction? I can identify most of those predators by the size, color, and shape of their eyes. None of them want to be our friend.”

She lowers her weapon, putting her arrows back in her quiver, screwing her mouth up into a bitter scowl.

“We’re not leaving until the body is burned.” Her tone is low and menacing, set against a rumble of thunder in the distance that warns of a perilous storm just beyond the horizon. “That’s an order, Piandao.”

She will throw fireballs at Piandao’s head if he tells her that deserters aren’t lawfully allowed funeral rites.

“We can’t burn the body here, General Guiying. The locals won’t like it, and they have weapons, too.”

“Then you carry the head, and I’ll carry the body. When we’ve cleared the jungle, I’ll burn it myself. You can go home if you want but I'm going to give Kumaru a proper burning.”

“Understood,” he says.

Guiying makes a sucking noise when she realizes what’s involved. She’s done a lot of messed-up shit in her time, but she’s never handled a headless corpse.

A flash of blue lightning bathes the jungle in silver daylight, revealing the blood-soaked cloak at her feet. She hunches forward, eyes burning, heaving, but she’s able to swallow it before it roars out of her.

He grabs the corpse by the arm, hefting it up onto his shoulder. He carries his sword and Kumaru’s head in his other hand.

“You first,” she says, extending her arm to offer him the lead.

“I should take the rear. An experienced survivalist needs to have your back.”

What’s to stop him from taking her head off from behind just like he did Kumaru’s and selling it to the highest bidder in the Earth Kingdom?

Or…

Azulon and Guiying don’t get on well. What if… What if there are two bounties Piandao was sent to collect? Why hadn’t this occurred to her sooner? She’d been so eager to find Kumaru before someone else did, that she completely took leave of her senses.

“That’s an order, Piandao. Start walking. I’ll be at least twenty-five feet behind you at all times.” She reaches her hand out. “And I’ll carry the head.”

The color in Piandao’s face goes slightly more yellow, suggesting that he’s hurt because she doesn’t trust him.

He hands the bag off to her. “It’s a bloody mess. Hold the bag out from your body to avoid getting the blood on your clothes.”

“Let’s go,” she orders.

She tries to ignore the fading light from the bag as the head gives off its last bit of heat, burning out like the embers of a dying fire.

It’s a long brutal trek back to base camp as they slosh through ankle-deep mud. The rain comes down in sheets, drenching them cold to the bone.

There’s an agonizing slowness to the passage of time during the course of the two-kilometer hike back as she watches Kumaru’s body begin the long fade to black.

If it weren’t so blasted cold and damp, maybe he would stay warm longer. At this rate, he’ll be cold as stone before she can burn him.

Her tears mix with the rain.

“You okay back there?”

“I’m fine,” she spits through gritted teeth, the grief choking her voice. “Keep moving!”

Her gaze is alert and fixated on the cool black shape of the sword hilt that’s clenched in Piandao’s glowing right hand.

“Camp’s just a few meters away, just over this next hill.”

Piandao’s voice sounds hollow. It’s as if he’s going through the motions of caring but he’s too hardened to offer the sentiment with any genuine affection.

They arrive back at base camp just as dawn starts to glow on the eastern horizon.

They’re heading west, back into the night. Maybe they can find a place to burn Kumaru while the sun rises. That will surely be a lovely gesture.

Piandao drops the crate at her feet. “Do you want to haul the head back or do you want me to load it onto my hound?”

“The head stays with me until we’re at Police Headquarters.”

He hands her the lid, the nails, and the hammer. “Have at it,” he says. “Do you want to start a fire? I can make some breakfast. The fish in the river are healthy, and the blackberries are safe to eat.”

“We’ll keep going. But the head and I need to take a bathroom break.” She points due south. “Over there, behind those trees.”

He hands her some mullein leaves. “Bend them in half, fuzzy side out, then wipe with the bend, not the points.”

“I--” She feels her cheeks warming with a blush. “Thank you.”

“Have fun,” he jokes in a half-hearted attempt to lighten the mood.

“I’ll do my best,” she mumbles.

In the soft pink glow of pre-dawn, Piandao looks drained like a soldier coming back from a rough patrol. She feels like he looks.

“I want to burn him at sunrise, Piandao,” she shouts from the treeline.

“If we run the hounds at top speed, we can keep going into the darkness then wait for the sunrise to catch up with us. There’s an abandoned town a hundred miles to the west. The eel hounds will get us there in just a few minutes. That will give us enough time to set up a makeshift pyre.”

“Fine,” she says behind a tense sign. “Stop talking. I can’t pee when people are talking to me.”

When she’s done, she finds Piandao is ready to continue on. He cuts a slice off of a homemade bar of soap, handing it to her. “Lather up. I’ll pour some water on your hands so you can properly wash them,” he says.

They’re able to gain two more hours of night, outrunning the dawn as they head west at a breakneck pace.

“That shed,” she says, pointing to a rundown structure a few yards away.

Piandao walks around it, inspecting it. “Looks like a tinderbox. Should burn quite well.”

“I want to be absolutely sure his body is burned to ash, Piandao. I don’t want some nosy person finding human remains while poking around in the rubble. Understood?”

He offers her a firm nod. “We’ll set the body on fire inside the shed as soon as we set up the pyre. It’ll still be burning when the sun rises.”

In a weirdly noble gesture, Piandao has brought a white silk pyre cloth to wrap his body in. It’s beautiful, embroidered with fire lilies, and scalloped along its edges.

She would have preferred Kuramu be laid to rest in a cloth offered up by his family. But, all things considered, this cloth is a fine substitute.

She lays the long red sash with golden fringes lengthwise down the body. Then she drapes another cloth, red, square, with the symbol of fire embroidered in black at it’s center, across his torso.

Piandao nods his approval. “Looks good.”

He assembles a pyre made from fast-burning branches and dead dried-up leaves and some wood from the shed that’s big enough to lay Kumaru’s headless body in. He even brought large steel nails to hold it all together. He’s thought of everything.

It’s getting light out. The dawn is coming…

She extends her arm, looking at the friend in front of her, wrapped in white, trimmed in crimson and gold.

_No hesitation._

She punches the fire out of her fist with a loud **_FWOOSH_ ** and the whole thing goes up, flames climbing all the way to the ceiling.

Piandao gives her a stained glass jar with oddly satisfying geometric patterns in blue, red, yellow, and frosted white that she can use as an urn.

“It was the nicest thing I could find on short notice,” he says.

“It’s nice,” she says, offering him a sad smile.

* * *

The sky is cloudless. It’s sapphire blue in the center, turning gold, red, and purple at the edges. The crisp autumn sun blinds her as it breaks over the mountain’s peak, blues and greens giving rise to a new and vibrant glow in the warmth of its golden light.

It’s breathtaking, but its beauty can’t ease her sorrow.

This is Kumaru’s last sunrise.

* * *

Police Headquarters is one of the tallest structures in the Capital, a gleaming metal phallus amongst a sea of white shale and limestone buildings. From her vantage point, seated at the heavy pine desk, she can see the Fire Palace situated at the city’s center, just three blocks from their location.

The Police Service is an extension of the Army. Guiying’s stark, clutter-free office reflects this. There’s a simple, wood-stained black bookshelf that runs along one wall filled with legal texts, and stacks of bound papers. There are Fire Nation flags and framed awards marking her achievements lining two of the metal walls. A perfectly boring portrait of Azulon’s bust hangs on the wall just behind her as a not-so-subtle reminder to her that he’s above her--over her--and she should not forget it.

They sit in silence while they wait for someone from the palace to inform them when they will get an audience with Azulon. She looks up from a scroll to find Piandao looking straight at her, eyes calm, a face like polished stone.

She huffs, nostrils flaring. “What?”

“No artwork? The portrait of Azulon doesn’t count.”

“It’s an office, Piandao, not a gallery. Sit over there and be quiet,” she snips as if she’s a mother scolding her misbehaving child. “And stop staring at me.”

She’s surrounded by a mountain of paperwork. Piandao sits in a high back metal chair near the door with his feet propped up on the bloody crate he stuffed Kumaru’s head into the night before.

“That was a nice burning that you gave Kumaru.”

Guiying tries to ignore him as she looks over the minutes from the morning briefing that she missed because she was carrying around her dead friend’s head.

“You were never in any danger,” Piandao says. “If things got messy, I knew you’d be able to defend yourself.”

Her eyes narrow as they scan down the page. “Shut up,” she grumbles.

“Fair enough.”

* * *

Azulon is his usual chipper self, sitting on the dais, looking threatening as his irate gaze passes between Piandao and Guiying.

“Piandao…” he grunts out as if acknowledging him is more than Azulon can stand. Azulon isn’t a People Person.

“You will take over Kumaru’s Division.”

“What?” Guiying squawks, incensed, knowing that there are at least seven relatives who want that position. “You’re promoting him to Major General? Why?”

“Shut up, woman! I don’t answer to you! The only reason you’re here, Guiying, is because I need you to push Piandao’s paperwork through, brief him on the situation with his Division, up his credentials, and get him a proper uniform.”

Piandao is thirty-six, the third youngest person behind Azulon and Iroh repsectively to ever hold the rank of General. To make matters worse, he’s never commanded more than three hundred men at any given time.

In times of great frustration, Guiying recalls her daughter’s sage advice: “Pick your battles, Mom.” Guiying is a bit of a stereotypically Fire Nation hot-head. It’d gotten her into some trouble in the past.

She and Piandao sit side-by-side, on their knees, in front of Azulon. He glares in pure disgust at her. Azulon does that a lot--glares at people, transmitting hatred through eye contact.

Piandao sits there, tall and quiet with his perfect posture and his neatly-folded hands and his eyes facing forward, revealing nothing of what’s going on inside his head. He’s been quiet since their arrival at the palace.

Now he will command more than twelve thousand men. Unlike his special operatives who are a bunch of super-soldier adrenaline junkies, most of the men fighting in the field aren’t interested in being bold and daring; they’re just trying to stay alive. She hopes he has the wisdom to understand this. If he can’t come to terms with that fact, his men will suffer greatly.

She literally bites down on her tongue to prevent herself from saying the kind of something they’ll all regret.

If she could ignore the men who come home from the war who are battered and beaten-down, then she wouldn’t care that Azulon seemingly lets rogues and upstarts and glorified mercenaries like Piandao run his military. They could just go completely crazy all over the Earth Kingdom. Fuck those dirt-feet Greens!

But the discharged men who march home after years-long tours-of-duty end up working in the Police Service, doing incredibly stressful work while they struggle to acclimate to civilian life. And they need so much psychiatric care and support that she’s had to create entire departments just to help them acclimate.

She thinks, if they had different leaders, maybe they wouldn’t be so broken. Maybe morale wouldn’t be at an all-time low. Maybe more men wouldn’t come home in pine boxes.

_It is what it is._

Piandao forgoes a celebration, complete with a military parade, in favor of an expedited return to the front to take command of his shiny new Division.

That’s just fine by her. Her friend is dead. As far as she’s concerned, there’s nothing to celebrate.

**Author's Note:**

> Ack! My shiny OC that I've coveted for years. <3 I surely hope you guys enjoy her.


End file.
